The Quiet American (2002)
Phillip Noyce, dir.
Starring Michael Caine, Brendan Faser, Do Thi Hai Yen

Bloody Sunday (2002)
Paul Greengrass, dir.
Paramount Classics

MIM recommends both of these films as artistic portrayals of real-life events.
The Quiet American, based on the Graham Greene novel of the same name,
is a stylized account of early Amerikan intervention in Vietnam. Although
fictionalized, the characters and events are based on real people and events,
and the film manages to convey under-the-surface truths in a powerful way.
Bloody Sunday, on the other hand, is shot quasi-documentary style, and
effectively captures the feeling that anything was possible at the height of the
civil rights movement in the early 1970s in British-occupied northern Ireland.

Both films have contemporary relevance. The Quiet American shows how
the Amerikan CIA used Vietnamese middlemen to carry out terrorism to further its
own, ostensibly "democratic" ends. These tactics ultimately convinced many
Vietnamese (and their friends) that the Amerikans and their quislings were
enemies of the Vietnamese people. Faced with overt and covert violence, the
Vietnamese took up arms to defend themselves. 

The march at the center of  Bloody Sunday  was to protest the British
policy of internment, which gave the army and police the authority to hold
people without trial. Similar measures are part of the USA Patriot Act. Again,
rather than quell dissent or stop the nascent movement for armed struggle in
British-occupied Ireland, the abusive internment policy sparked an
anti-internment mass movement--and the murderous crackdown on this movement led
many to conclude that only armed resistance could be effective.

 The Quiet American.
 The central conceit of this film is the conflict
between the idealistic Amerikan Pyle (Brendan Fraser) and the jaded English
journalist Fowler (Michael Caine) over Fowler's lover, the Vietnamese womyn
Phoung (Do Thi Hai Yen). Pyle--who is in fact a CIA agent--presents himself as a
medical aid worker who cares too much about the people of Vietnam not to get
involved. Fowler claims he never gets involved and just wants to live his life
in peace. The central scene in the film is an act of terrible violence which
pulls down Pyle's "caring" façade and convinces Fowler to take action on behalf
of the Vietnamese--in the right way and for the right reasons. The scene is
moving in its own right and noteworthy because it says so much (correct) about
Amerikan rhetoric, motivations, and actions in Vietnam as well as the Vietnamese
response--all in about five minutes. It conveys the kernel of what we Maoists
call rational or theoretical knowledge about the war in Vietnam through art,
rather than though journalism or history.

The character of Phoung is the weak link in the triangle. Both as a womyn and as
symbol for Vietnam she is far too passive and dependent on Western
support--although one could take this as a criticism of Vietnam's colonial
status at the time. 

Bloody Sunday. 
 Often historical films portray the past as something
monolithic and mechanical, as if history were a train chugging along its set
course. Bloody Sunday avoids this temptation. It evokes the feeling
that no one (outside perhaps of a very few army officers) knew that January 30,
1972 would end with a massacre of unarmed marchers by the British army. It also
manages to portray history as a struggle. There is a struggle between the Irish
and British camps, and there are struggles within each--between pacifists and
radicals among the marchers, and between "moderate" officers who preferred to
quietly arrest a few leaders and aggressive officers who wanted (and got) a
wide-spread crackdown. Aside from its artistic merits, Bloody Sunday
deserves credit for popularizing what is now known about the British army's
plans that day and the subsequent cover-up.(1)

Although shot in a realistic style, using hand-held cameras and few
professionally-trained actors (former marchers and soldiers play themselves),
the filmmakers put a lot of thought into exactly which events to portray and
how, so viewers get a sense of the causes underlying the events of the day, even
while they experience some of the confusion that always accompanies political
struggle and military action.

On the protestors' side, Bloody Sunday focuses on Ivan Cooper of the
Social Democratic Labor Party, a supporter of non-violence. As is clear from the
film's ending and the DVD commentary, the filmmakers share Cooper's analysis
that Bloody Sunday was the high-water mark of the non-violent civil rights
movement; after the British army's crackdown prolonged armed struggle was
inevitable. Cooper concludes the film saying the British army's "Bloody Sunday"
massacre was the IRA's biggest victory, in the sense that it was a crackerjack
advert for the IRA.

MIM agrees with Cooper on this point and has often said similar things in the
past, namely that the brutality of the status quo and its defenders does more to
create allies for MIM's revolutionary cause than MIM's eloquence alone ever
could. However, there is an implicit criticism in Cooper's stance, to the effect
that armed struggle is always an impetuous mistake with particular appeal to the
youth. While this is true in particular circumstances--MIM does not advocate
armed struggle in Amerika today and is critical of groups like the Amerikan
Weather Underground, who made armed struggle a point of morality, rather than an
issue of strategic effectiveness--it is not true in general. When non-violent
struggle to eliminate the everyday violence of hunger and poverty is
consistently opposed with violence, the oppressed must consider all of their
options. There is no moral value in using an ineffective weapon. Historically,
violent struggle to overthrow the oppressors has done more to end violence than
appeals to God the oppressors conscience--witness the Amerikan Civil War and the
great gains in life expectancy in the Soviet Union and China after their
successful socialist revolutions.(2)

 Both of these film are out on DVD as of July 2003. The many extras on
"Bloody Sunday" are full of historical details that deepen the viewer's
understanding. For example, the director's commentary includes an interesting
discussion on the relationship between the armed Republican movement and the
marchers--which was not one of 100% agreement, but neither was it antagonistic.
The extras on "The Quiet American" are shallow and can be skipped, except for
the comments of the Vietnamese filmmakers on the central bombing scene.
Interested viewers can check out further reading on Vietnam at MIM's bookstore:
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/bookstore/books/index.html#A. 

Notes:
1. For more on the background to Bloody Sunday and the British Army's cover-up,
see our review of "Sunday," another docudrama.
2. For more on questions of armed struggle, see MIM's Frequently Asked Questions
pages: http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/faq/violence.html and
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/faq/philviolence.html.